By Barney Ronay, The Guardian/London
It is a natural part of our post-modern, endlessly self-referential world – yodelling to itself from platform to platform – that certain contradictions will appear, pockets of impossibility. In the TV series The Sopranos, for example, it was necessary to construct a complete modern-day fictional world where the characters watch TV, talk about the president, do impressions of The Godfather and discuss with knowing, pop-culture smarts the portrayal of Italian-American gangsters in the mainstream media, but in which nobody has ever heard of The Sopranos.
At times you felt like shouting out: “Guys, chaps, seriously, you’ve never seen it? It’s the No1 TV show in the US! There’s even a mob boss called ... And they have just the same kind of self-referential ... And, whoah, Sil, you know you really look like the guy out of Bruce Springsteen ... Sil, please ... wait ... no.”
The Sopranos Paradox tends to apply to any kind of credibility-stretching soap opera where a pretence of everyday normality is doggedly maintained throughout. As such it is perhaps no surprise it should apply to the professional life of Kevin Pietersen, and in particular to Thursday night’s KP documentary, a fascinating hour of television during which the makers of Being Kevin Pietersen did their very best to create a functioning semi-fictional world, albeit one in which, oddly, nobody has ever heard of Kevin Pietersen.
You know: the real Kevin Pietersen. The one we have now come to know quite well between the brilliance and the horrors. Needy and nightmarishly intense, a graceless, loveable doofus-genius of an all-time England great; by turns impossibly talented, impossibly watchable and, simply, impossible.
In Being Kevin Pietersen this more familiar KP has been replaced by a character of the same name, who is instead just a really great open, uncomplicated guy, who if anything is too nice, too honest and too straightforward but who has still somehow – and without any real explanation here – managed to make an enemy of successive England head coaches and Test captains, in the process trashing spectacularly and prematurely his own glorious international career.
With this in mind Being Kevin Pietersen just doesn’t make any narrative sense. This new innocent, entirely reasonable KP is simply wronged, inexplicably. Former teammates become furious despots, inexplicably. In the soft focus haze of Being KP, it really does seem nobody has heard of Tony Soprano after all.
As such this isn’t really a documentary film but a kind of extended soft focus advert for Pietersen, a Pietersen infomercial, the kind of thing you might glimpse vaguely on a plane or on 24-hour chain-hotel cable TV in between adverts for the Malaysian tourist industry or a brand of high end business luggage. The opening shots give us KP in everyday mode, strolling along the beach in mirrored shades “suntannin’ and chillin’” and talking about how, you know, great everything is right now. Here’s KP on safari. Here’s KP revealing that his nickname among the Aussies was for a while “Fuck I’m good just ask me”. Here’s KP talking about how misunderstood he is. “As soon as I club somebody for being a muppet that goes into the media,” he says, which certainly does sound unreasonable.
At which point, with the camera on, KP starts to club people for being muppets. There is some real anger still here. KP regrets calling Andrew Strauss a “doos” although he does direct a “fuck you” in Strauss’s vague direction recalling the moment he was ordered not to speak to his friends in the South African team. The claim that he discussed with the opposition how to get his captain out was “the biggest amount of bullshit”. The genuinely odd business of the KP genius parody Twitter account was a “dagger through my heart”. “They couldn’t bully me to my face because I’d tell them to fuck off, so they did it on social media, ripped me to shreds.”
Naturally the best bits are the glimpses of some actual cricket. We get the familiar archive footage of young, wild, adrenal KP, legs splayed, swatting the ball over midwicket in a vengeful blur. Mic’d up for a T20 game he sprints, yells and wallops as the periphery fades, and there he is again. KP! A great goofy, blabbering nonsense-bottle off the field. But on it still our own overgrown labrador of a batting giant, captivating, shrewd and devastatingly good. How did we get from there to here? The question is never really approached in Being Kevin Pietersen. This is a no-fault portrait. Bad Kevin, or at least fascinatingly human Kevin is absent.
There are only two points worth making about all this. Firstly, for all the bluster the only really interesting thing about Pietersen is his batting. The only really worthwhile KP documentary would be an endless loop, without commentary or voiceover, of his top 10 England innings, from The Oval to Mumbai to Headingley. As long as he still has a residue of the required flex, twang and anger in those great dangling forearms Pietersen has one useful public function: playing cricket for England.
Whatever the standard, 567 runs in his past 10 T20 games suggests there is still some traction in that whirl of the bat, those high-spec hand-eye mechanics. As such it is still impossible to see any sensible reason why he shouldn’t be treated like any other player and at least be considered for selection for next year’s ICC World Twenty20 where his power and craft may suit the conditions. That there is, realistically, no chance of this happening is a triumph of animosity over both dispassionate selection and commercial logic (it would, let’s face it, be unmissable).
And secondly there is just something rather sad about Pietersen’s current state of itinerant professional limbo. He talks blithely about playing “franchise cricket” as though this rag-bag crickertainment is just a thing that all top players might choose to do as a year-round occupation from now on. He is, though, too harsh a critic not to know that much of the time it is simply second rate, a zombified form peopled by drifters, fill-ins and the odd redundant, dying star.
Kevin Pietersen
